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Web Portals : Buy vs. Build corporate portal options
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Corporate Portal Solutions |
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So you've made your case and gained approval to proceed into the discovery process of analyzing your corporate portal purpose, your audience(s) and their needs, and what infrastructure you will need in place to implement your solution. With today's corporate budget constraints and staffing challenges the big question now is - Do we buy an off-the-shelf solution or build it internally?
Any project is going to require the basic items:
- Resources - including technical staff, business users and possibly vendors and consulting services.
- Time - is this project slated to be an initiative that the company will invest it's time in? A corporate portal deployment is not something that happens over night. From the open-source MetaDot portal to Microsoft Share Point Server, you will need time to implement the plan.
- Money - there is no such thing as "FREE". Open-source to licensed software - you will incur some type of costs.
- Commitment - form your implementation team and get complete commitment. nothing kills a project faster than when team members start to drop off or get reallocated to other projects.
- Requirements - Get them finalized, in stone. You cannot buy or build something unless you have a clear understanding of what the "something" needs to be. Be aware of scope creep and log "nice to haves" that were included in the original design as future enhancements.
- Training - no matter what you do - allow for training and upgrading skill sets.
When interviewing vendors, be prepared to ask the following questions about their web portal solution:
- Does your corporate portal deployment support Java and/or .NET - or is it tied to a single application development platform?
- Is their corporate portal solution scalable to allow for future growth?
- How complex will the server architecture be? Can our IT staff support in ongoing?
- How well does your enterprise web portal solution integrate with legacy systems? repositories or existing corporate portal technologies?
- Will there be a lot of time spent hand-coding the portlets or application?
- What is the implementation process? And, how long does it take?
- What is available out-of-the-box?
- Does it provides administrators and content managers wizards and other easy to user tools?
- Can I integrate existing corporate portal content and portlets into your solution?
- Does your solution offer content management and a robust search engine?
- Does it present data across IIS, Apache and Websphere?
- Can it present both static and dynamic data?
- Does it offer collaboration tools to allow end-user to effectively communicate with each other?
There will be benefits to building it yourself and to buying a packaged solution. Present your case to leadership and those would control the cash flow. Something may take longer to build but save you money up front, but it may be more costly to support it later.
This web portal methodolgy is one that is required for either building your web portal or buying one.
<< back to Step 3: Corporate Portal Infrastructure Planning >>
<< read about Step 5: Communication is Key >>
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